The Dangers of Magical Thinking in the World of PPC

I think it is safe to say that we all engage in magical thinking from time to time. If we didn’t take part, then professional hockey players wouldn’t have beards, baseball players would have clean socks, and there would be far fewer amateur rabbit podiatrists. In some ways, magical thinking can be a useful tool to help us with the stresses of everyday life. The problem occurs when we start to carry these ideas into the realm of the business world, as it can have devastating effects on our bottom line. How many “sure-thing-no-way-we-can-lose” stock ideas have brought people to the edge of bankruptcy? What we really need is a Joe Friday approach to business: Just the facts, ma’am.

When you look at a typical PPC company, you generally see a group of underpaid, overworked people combing through enough spreadsheets to gag a rhino. We could spend days looking at why these traditional companies never seem to create revenue growth for their customers, but today we will focus on just one: The Good Feeling. When a person looks at any information, they have to constantly be vigilant to not taint the information with their own feelings. Unfortunately, this is almost impossible. If you put a company in charge of your optimization that is depending on people (don’t forget the fact that they are underpaid, over-tired people, and only doing it so that they can move to another company in a couple of years) to take all of this information, compile it into something that has a vague semblance of logical arrangement, and then make a completely unbiased choice based solely on the data, then we are all engaging in a bit of magical thinking. When we look at things that way, it makes us wonder why we ever thought that this was a good way to optimize our PPC.

Now take Finch, a PPC company that is software driven. Computers don’t have good or bad feelings about things; they can only make decisions based on the data at hand. Computers don’t get tired and slip up, and they don’t have a difficult time keeping all of your keywords in their head at one time. The Finch software is going to look at your keywords, and based solely on their past performance make cold, calculating, and unbiased decisions on which of them are worth your precious ad spend, and which of them are a complete money sink. There’s no room for magical thinking in the world of business, and with Finch you’ll never have to worry about it entering the equation again.